Great battery life. Nice screen, keyboard, and multimedia remote control. Just five pounds including optical drive.

Cons

Creaky integrated graphics. Blu-ray and Bluetooth not included.

Bottom Line

A compact laptop with a big battery, the HP Pavilion dv3-2150us is an appealing alternative to its big-screen multimedia centers.

Shrink the system and bulk up the battery: It's not rocket science, but it's a winning recipe for portable PC design. HP does it with the Pavilion dv3-2150us ($849.98 list), which reduces the company's desktop-replacement media-center platformcomplete with infrared remote controlto a 5-pound, 13.3-inch form factor and adds a long-lasting 9-cell battery. It's not as slim and elegant as our Editors' Choice Acer Aspire 3935 (6504) or Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch, but it works, and it's reasonably priced to boot.

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At 8.7 by 12.9 by 1.4 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.8 pounds (including its AC adapter), the dv3 is an easy fit in most briefcases or backpacks, with a vaguely Yellow Submarine-ish circles-and-curves pattern adorning its glossy black lid and palm rest. Its keyboard has a good typing feeland larger cursor arrows and PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End keys than its 16- and 17-inch HP siblings, though not the separate numeric keypad of those machines. The smudge-magnet chrome touchpad is a little short vertically but has large, comfortable mouse buttons.

Features

Like the HP Pavilion dv3z, the dv3-2150us has a glossy 13.3-inch display. It makes movies and photos look terrific, and its 1,366 by 768 resolution strikes me as a good fit for this screen size (even as I considered the same resolution a tad skimpy on the 16-inch dv6-1253cl).

Microphone and headphone jacks are at the HP's front edge, along with the infrared receiver for its multimedia remote controla cute gadget barely bigger than a Halloween miniature candy bar, it hides in the notebook's ExpressCard/34 slot. As an alternative to Windows Media Center, the dv3-2150us comes with HP MediaSmart software reminiscent of the company's TouchSmart desktop suite for perusing photos, DVDs, music, and videos. (The notebook also comes with HP's usual set of game, online-service, and marketing-offer crapware, as well as Norton Security 2009 with 60 days of updates.)

Two USB ports adjoin the DVD+/-RW drive at the left side. A combo USB/eSATA port is at the right, as are HDMI, VGA, and Ethernet ports, the ExpressCard slot, and an SD/MMC/xD/MS flash-card slot.

Performance

Unlike the dv3z, the dv3-2150us has Intel rather than AMD parts under the hooda 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T6500 processor and Intel integrated-graphics chipset. The latter is about as fast as continental drift, as seen by the system's piteous 3DMark06 scores; any halfway serious gamer should steer clear. That said, the CPU is fairly capable. Even though it's one of the T- rather than P-series chips with 2MB, not 3MB, of Level 2 cachethe system's Windows Media Encoder, Cinebench R10, and Photoshop CS4 benchmarks are all competitive with the Aspire 3935 (6504) and MacBook Pro 13-inch (Though the Apple, to be fair, will be quicker running native apps than running Windows benchmark tests under Boot Camp).

Indeed, the system's best feature is its battery life: The 83-watt-hour battery pack protrudes to prop up the notebook at a comfortable typing angle on table or desk, and the dv3 kept going for just a minute shy of seven hours in our MobileMark 2007 rundown test, outstripping both the Apple and Acer laptops by a couple of hours. Even allowing for real-world applications' usually shorter span, you'll have no trouble fitting in a whole DVD movie, if not two, on your next long flight.

The dv3-2150us isn't a high-performance hot rod nor is its screen is big enough to admire every detail of panoramic HD entertainment. Instead, it's a highly-portable, general-purpose PC that's also a nifty DVD player and online-video enjoyer. The Aspire 3935 is a more svelte (1 inch thick) and stylish alternative for $100 more, but the HP's great battery life makes it a great combination of versatility and value.

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About the Author

Formerly editor-in-chief of Home Office Computing, Eric Grevstad is a contributing editor for PCMag and Computer Shopper, where he earlier served as lead laptop analyst and executive editor, respectively. A tech journalist since the TRS-80 and Apple II days, Grevstad specializes in lightweight laptops, all-in-one desktops, and productivity software... See Full Bio

HP Pavilion dv3-2150us

HP Pavilion dv3-2150us

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